It's not necessarily a great idea if your personal identifying information such as your name, phone number, email, and mailing address is out there. If somebody knows you and figures out when you go on vacation for example, you can be a victim of burglary. And scams and identity theft - or maybe even just too much junk mail can always be a concern. There are some great common sense methods you can take to keep your home address private as possible.
1) Remove your address from any websites which publish it. Do a Google search for your personally identifying information like your home mailing address. Chances are that you will find records of yourself out there. There are some great privacy services out there that will gladly do the hard work for you for a very small daily fee and monitor, remove, and report on your data. If you can search for your info and find it, others can find it too.
2) Use a Private Post Office Box or Mailbox Rental. Many celebrities are often targets of stalkers and attackers and don't want their identities out there. They'll often use a fake name when staying at hotels for instance: such as the allegations of Michael Vick having the hilarious "Ron Mexico" moniker. If you sell lots of items on eBay or have your address out there for any reason and are concerned about somebody going after you, using a P.O. Box and redirecting your mail to it (USPS does that free) is a great idea. Now many businesses and people will have much less exposure to your personal address and make it harder for a wrong-doer to target you. For a relatively low cost, you can keep your address very private and the only real cost is having to visit the post office to pick things up once in a while.
3) Follow best security practices. Check your social media and store profile privacy setttings. Don't post dumb things online. Talk to your family (and especially your kids) about not posting their private information online. Follow basic common sense privacy tips. Watch out for email phishing scams. This will all contribute towards keeping you as safe as possible.
We hope you enjoyed reading this guide and learned something new! Check out our Learning Center to learn more about online privacy and security or consider subscribing to our Online Privacy Service to remove your phone number, name, and address from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo search results and hundreds of data broker sites.